Sunday, October 23, 2011

It's not hard to guess that with a visit from Jeffrey Eugenides (today, at Noon), it's not hard to predict that The Marriage Plot is our #1 book for hardcover fiction next Sunday. But it's not all about rank, is it? It's also about time. This is our first 12 Noon event for a major author; I told him that if this was well, the 6 am slot was a possibility in the future. (Editor's note: it's isn't really).

Note that Mr. Eugenides is #2 on next Sunday's New York Times bestseller list, following Nicholas Sparks. On our list, he's after Chad Harbach for his pre-event week, but that's due in part to Harbach's successful reading here last Thursday.

Hardcover fiction

1. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
2. The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
3. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
4. The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje
5. The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain
6. Damned, by Chuck Palahniuk
7. Zone One, by Colson Whitehead
8. The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick Dewitt
9. The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
10. The Lost Memory of Skin, by Russell Banks

And yes, there's another author who hit all three shortlists--Esi Edugyan for Half Blood Blues. I'm trying to figure out what happened here with this book. It's published by Serpents Tail in the UK and was distributed here through Consortium (and seemingly will be available through Ingram at short discount, nonreturnable). But now Picador has bought American distribution rights and will come out from them in February. I'm so confused by the whole thing--won't some publishing insider explain it to me?

And in my "don't do the bestsellers lists when you're tired moment #1", Reamde was accidentally listed as nonfiction on the list that I sent out to the trade. Alas!

Paperback fiction:
1. The Book of Life, by Stuart Nadler
2. Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
3. Traffic Stop, by Janet Ruth Heller
4. Old Filth, by Jane Gardam
5. The All of It, by Jeannette Haien

Things I would like to say:

1) Even if it's because of an event, I would like to congratulate Mr. Nadler at outselling Mr. Franzen

2) I wanted to tell Maile Meloy at GLIBA that by her recommending The All of It to Ann Patchett, she led to it being on our bestseller list for 14 weeks now. With about 3-5 copies sold every week, you can figure out how many we've sold. Isn't that swell? Her new kids book is The Apothecary. Here's a little PW quote: "Even those with a vague understanding of the times will be quickly swept up in this thoroughly enjoyable adventure, filled with magic, humor, memorable characters, and just a bit of sweet romance."

Paperback nonfiction:

1. Write-a-thon, by Rochelle Melander

2. Children's Writers and Illustrators Market

3. Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff

4. Galileo's Daughters, by Dava Sobel

5. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

With the hardcover fiction list being so guy heavy, it's nice to have women dominating paperback nonfiction, of all places. Jason and I were noting that Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers was cleverly published in the fall when most publishers save their literary women for winter and spring. Unlike last year, I can't complain about the literary fiction releases this fall--not just Harbach and Eugenides and Banks and Palahniuk and Whitehead and Stephenson, but Eco and Murakami and several others are still to come.

Children's hardcovers

1. Bluefish, by Pat Schmatz

2. Wisdom's Kiss, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

3. All the Things I Love About You, by Leuyen Pham

4. Baby Says Moo, by Joann Early Macken

5. Bedtime for Mommy, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal (illustrated by Pham)

Children's paperbacks
1. Dairy Queen, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

2. Mercy Lily, by Lisa Albert

3. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Error #2--I left Bluefish off some of our bestseller reports to the trade. Amie is very enthusiastic about Pat Schmatz's new book, the story of a teen boy who is taught to read by a teacher and a classmate. When Amie noticed the omssion, she said, "Don't worry. I'll get it on the bestseller list again, even without the SCBWI conference.

2 comments:

From our pal Mary, who works at Trafalgar Square, another distributor that brings in UK editions:"The rights confusion is a common thing for us at TSP. The British publisher has no luck selling rights early on, so they list the UK edition with their US distributor. But then the book gets hot, wins a prize, or something, and suddenly a US publisher is interested & buys rights. When this happens, they often want to kill the UK edition quickly, rush into print early to stop the sale of the UK edition and capture the sales for their own edition."

Thank you for mentioning my poetry book Traffic Stop on your website. I was raised in Milwaukee, graduated from Shorewood High School, and have a B.A. and an M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Many of the poems in Traffic Stop are about the midwest.